


25.12.1932

by hedera_helix



Series: Dresden [3]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - World War II, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-09
Updated: 2016-08-09
Packaged: 2018-08-07 18:10:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7724599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedera_helix/pseuds/hedera_helix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Levi's thirteenth birthday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	25.12.1932

**Author's Note:**

> This is a little thing I wrote as a birthday present to someone that ties to this scene from Dresden:
> 
> _“What’s gotten you in such a great mood?” he asks Erwin whose smile only widens at the question._
> 
> _“I didn’t realise it was out of the ordinary,” he says, “but now that you mention it I suppose I am feeling rather good.”_
> 
> _“Well, at least one of us is,” Levi mutters, shaking his head when Erwin doesn’t hear. “What’s the occasion?”_
> 
> _“Well, I don’t know,” Erwin muses, sipping at his tea. “I saw Marie and little Sofie yesterday. They are both in very good health.”_
> 
> _“Glad to hear it,” Levi tells him, reaching for another biscuit – he’s not had anything so sweet in years._
> 
> _“And I suppose…” Erwin starts, stopping to scoff quietly. “Well, it’s coming to Christmas now.”_
> 
> _Levi agrees in a low, unenthusiastic hum that makes Erwin laugh._
> 
> _“I’m sorry, I didn’t think,” he says. “What did you celebrate? Before all this?”_
> 
> _“My birthday,” Levi replies, biting into the biscuit. “When my uncle would remember.”_
> 
> _The words make him think back to those times, how every day with Kenny was more or less exactly like the previous one no matter what the occasion. Sometimes he’d let Levi take a bar of chocolate from the stock, though he never failed to remind him it was money out of his pocket. The birthday Levi remembers most clearly even now was his thirteenth; he’d never seen his uncle looking so ill at ease before, sitting Levi down at the kitchen table and muttering to him about laws and the Torah and who knows what while Levi held his tongue not to ask him if he’d been drinking more than usual. The gift then was special too: a pair of shoes made out of good brown leather, not second-hand either like most of the clothes and things Kenny got him. Levi wore them for several years, not telling Kenny when they started to get tight around the toes._

It’s all still weighing heavily on Kenny’s mind as he tries the handle of the door to the shop before fishing the keys out of his pocket, feeling a sting of guilt for testing to see if it was locked. Should’ve trusted the kid to be able to follow a simple order like that, he thinks when he passes the half-empty shelves to let his aching feet carry him up the stairs from the small and empty storeroom. It’s not as if he’s not done it before, closed the shop when Kenny himself hasn’t been around, when that damned thirst of his has gotten the better of him and having a pint in his hand has seemed more important than being responsible. It’s been a couple of days since his last drink now. It tells Kenny he doesn’t really need one, has maybe never really needed one in the past, but he can’t decide if it’s a good thing, or whether it means he could’ve chosen differently all this time. He glances at the package pinned between his arm and his side sourly – it’ll mean more sober days, and right now Kenny doesn’t know whether it’s all worth it.

He can hear the splashing of the water when he closes the door behind himself, and as soon as he walks into the small kitchen the questions that bothered him before shoot through his mind and he tries to fight them away, tries not to let the sight of the kid make them scream louder in his head. Kenny rushes over to the table jerkily, placing the package under it on a chair, out of sight, as if some part of him is still contemplating returning the damn thing. He looks over at Levi who, as far as he knows, hasn’t so much as glanced behind himself from the dishes; he’s cooked his own dinner again, there are fried potatoes and cabbage waiting on the table for Kenny and he sits down to eat them, though he’s not hungry and they’re already cool. He can feel the package against his thigh and flinches.

“Lot of people come by?”

He watches the kid shake his head – the way his shoulders slump tells Kenny he’s probably been alone in the shop for hours, perched on the high stool behind the counter, staring ahead of himself in that dull way he sometimes does when Kenny hasn’t given him something to do. He wonders what Levi’s thinking about then – hell, he might as well wonder what he’s thinking about now. Most kids cry, do something to tell you what pointless problem they’re going to whine about next, but not Levi. He frowns but never complains, and now that Kenny thinks about it, he can’t remember the last time he heard the kid laugh or even saw him smile. There’s relief in that, too – he looks enough like Kuchel even without smiling and the last thing Kenny needs to be reminded of now is her stinking corpse. She’s been in his head too often lately as it is.

He fills his mouth with more potato before looking up from his plate at the kid. He’s drying the dishes, getting up on his toes just to put them on the lowest shelves of the cupboards – too small for his age, and Kenny knows it’s another thing he’s not done right, he didn’t put enough food on the table those first couple of years, choosing instead to save up to buy a place to set up his shop. They eat well enough now, but that won’t help the poor bastard runt now will it? Now it’s another thing Kenny ought to help him with, another thing with which he doesn’t know where to start. He can see the brown paper of the package at the edge of his vision, a constant reminder of what day it is and how clearly it marks all of his failings; it makes him grit his teeth and light a smoke before he can speak up.

“Put those away. Sit down for a second.”

Levi looks behind himself, his face showing a question behind that usual frown. Kenny follows him with his eyes as he finishes drying a plate, careful not to leave a single wet smear behind. The care he takes makes Kenny feel impatient but he says nothing; seems to him the kid gets something out of it, and God knows he needs all the help he can get. He watches Levi as he crosses the room with a few careful steps before drawing the chair; the scraping sound makes Kenny’s heart beat faster and he wants to curse at the way his hand keeps shaking ashes out of his cigarette. He wipes them onto the floor, exhaling a cloud of smoke that makes Levi crinkle his nose and Kenny put out the cigarette.

“You’re thirteen today,” he says, his voice so rough he has to clear his throat; across the table, Levi merely blinks as he continues, “Some people think that’s important.”

Why did he say that? _Some people think it’s important._

“Is it?”

Kenny looks up and damns the brat for pressing the question. Is it important? And if it is, to whom is it important? He remembers the day though he’s tried to keep from thinking about it for close to a year: walking up to the bimah, the letters on the scroll skipping before his eyes with him near too nervous to catch them. He remembers looking up once he finished reading, for the first time with his head held high, and he felt so grown-up, like the whole world had suddenly opened up. They had a feast that night – his cousin Mordechai ate too much and kept farting during dessert – and in the evening his father sat him down on the steps of their house and gave him a long speech about responsibility. As he looks over at Levi now, Kenny thinks the man was wasting his time.

“I don’t know, kid,” Kenny admits, turning to stare at the chipped paint of the table, scratching the back of his head absently. “Where I come from it’s a special age, is all I know.”

“Why?”

Kenny grits his teeth and lets out a hiss of a sigh. Just like his mother in this too, asking stupid questions like these. Kuchel was curious to a fault, always wanting to know things, and Kenny half suspects she got herself pregnant out of curiosity too. She never asked about these things, though; she was always a good girl, knew more about most things than Kenny and certainly more about this, and admitting that to himself makes Kenny’s insides twist like he’s getting the shits.

“They say it’s when you’re all grown up,” Kenny starts, moving his eyes onto the cupboards, trying to remember the words his father used. “You need to start accepting responsibility for the shit you pull.”

“With the police?” the kid asks in a strange croak that leaves him clearing his throat; his voice has been teetering on the edge of breaking for months and it’s taken all of Kenny’s tact not to point it out.

“Those pigs give you trouble you run straight to me, you understand?” Kenny asks, pointing a shaky finger at the kid’s bony chest. “And if you so much as catch a glimpse of those brown-shirt fuckers lurking around here, you let me know and I’ll give them all a couple more holes to shit through, you hear me?”

The kid nods almost solemnly, like a soldier accepting a command; it makes Kenny sigh again and press the heel of his hand against his forehead. He can see Levi half-glancing behind himself, like he’s itching to get back to the dishes, like none of this is making any sense to him, and Kenny has to wonder how it’s all come to this.

“It’s a Jew thing,” he finally says, cringing at the frown the words draw on Levi’s face. “Us Jews, we think it’s important.”

He pushes his hands into his hair and scratches at the dry skin of his scalp, thinking about the bottle he’s stashed in the drawer of his bedside table. God knows he could use a drink right now, but it’s more likely he’d leave the whole thing as it now stands than sit here and make his way through explaining it. Across the table the kid sits and stares; that frown on his face reads to Kenny like a challenge to get it together, but no matter how hard he tries to pull at the edges, to bring the past into this moment, it slips through his fingers, like the drink has drowned it for good.

“It’s when you’re thirteen you…” Kenny starts, stopping to swear and groan as he fights to remember. “You need to start obeying the law – the Jewish law.”

“Shouldn’t I know the law first?”

Kenny groans. Kuchel had that smart mouth too, especially when she got older. She could always talk Kenny under the table, that’s for sure, and that was just because she was right about things more often than not. And the kid’s right about this. When Kenny looks across the table at him, the realisation that he knows nothing about any of this hits him like a punch in the gut, but even that is nothing compared to the thought of what Kuchel would say to all of this. This is her kid, a son she had circumcised, whom she named Levi, whom she probably would have wanted to learn what all of this means, who he is and where he comes from. She would have wanted him to have his bar mitzvah. The knowledge weighs on Kenny like a sack of cement, the admission that he has failed, hasn’t just fucked up his own life, but Levi’s life too.

“I don’t have time to teach you,” Kenny says; a lie, and it comes out as more of a growl despite the fact he’s trying to soften his tone. “Besides, you need books for that and those cost money.”

Levi’s expression never shifts even a fraction; he’s not interested in learning anything, probably wants to get this over and done with as badly as Kenny himself does.

“Maybe your mum would have wanted you to know is all,” Kenny tells him, feeling his guilt catching him by the throat. “I’ve not done the best job with telling you about all this and… Well, it’s probably too late now in any case.”

Finally he picks up the package and places it onto the table, lighting another cigarette while Levi merely stares, his eyes scanning the brown paper and coarse string in confusion.

“For fuck’s sake,” Kenny swears, shaking the lit match to make it go out before throwing it into the ashtray. “They’re for you. And you’d better tell me if they don’t fit, I don’t need you to get bad feet and need all sorts of doctors on top of everything else.”

Slowly Levi lifts the package onto his lap and starts pulling on the strings, brows still furrowed like he’s never seen a birthday present before; another punch in Kenny’s gut. When he stoops down to pull on the shoes – good brown leather, something to keep his socks dry at least – he looks too small for them, too young to be responsible for anything, too young to cook his drunk uncle’s dinner. As Kenny watches him he realises he doesn’t even know when the kid learned to tie his own laces.

“They’re good,” Levi says, answering Kenny’s curt nod with a flash of a smile.


End file.
